The Down-Deep Desert
by skywalker05
Summary: "How'd you get so old?" she asked. "Suppose every time I got on top of something I held on," said the Ace. Furiosa is sent on a supply run early in her days as an imperator.


The day she heard about the underground, Furiosa ran straight from the shop to the immortan. The same mechanic who told her she was barren told her that her prosthetic arm was balanced badly, that the harness would bruise her shoulder. Bury him, she thought. Get his elbows off her knees and hit him.

She bowed her head in front of the immortan, looking at the dust between his feet.

He told her they found a cache under the Citadel, that there was food and clothing for the taking. They were mapping it out, him and his sons and his older imperators. He told her about the doorways. "Go to the down-there desert. Bring me back gear and life for my war boys."

She nodded again. The pustules and yellow stains under his plastic armor glistened like water.

"The one they call the Ace will help you. Gather them soon."

"Soon."

Could mean anything - meant now, really, this hour. The next breath. So she took it and she turned, knowing she'd have to leave guard duty to someone else, would have to shove things into order and then find that war boy driver.

"And Furiosa?"

She turned around.

The voice bounced off the walls, off the bronze fixtures and off of Rictus. "When you do this, you will truly take your place as an imperator. Until then, you're grasping at something you almost have."

Furiosa met his eyes and thought that of course he couldn't let her just have something. Wouldn't act that way toward his villagers and wasteland waifs either, because it helps to always be enforcing something. That was part of Immortan Joe's power: he enforced laws he had made seconds before with the same fist and foot that enforced the laws of this rotted world.

When she found the Ace she didn't tell him to hurry.

"What we up against?" he asked, looking at her steady and cold. He was the oldest war boy she ever saw, she thought. Steady, bad breath, piston-quick.

"There's nobody alive down there," she said. "The most danger will probably be from rock falls, pits. Bring a lot of rope."

"Can do that," he said, looking distant as he thought about it. He would purse his lips and stare, and then come out of the stare all buzzed. "Maps? Anything certain?"

"Maps in the immortan's head, sounds like. Nothing much certain, but we'll map it as we go down."

"All right," Furiosa said, and the next day the whole shouting gang appeared in the tunnels. Maybe ten or twelve war boys gathered there, hooting and waving until Immortan Joe shuffled into the tunnel behind a microphone ringed with bronze. Could use that, Furiosa thought. Could beat it into all kinds of things.

"One blackthumb and one greenthumb and some others what wanted to come along," said Ace.

The immortan gave them a speech. Furiosa could see clearly that the hunting party would come back with arms full of hydroponics equipment, with packages wrapped in string. Would come back with food, mostly. Would ascend to heroic glory at the same time as they were descending.

(Tunnels? He'd never told her before about tunnels. It was an honor or a death sentence, and didn't matter which if she found something good enough down there.)

After the speech the War Boys opened the door.

There was an elevator in there. Set into the wall, rusted and flaking, spiked with the straight lines of old machinery (holy, holy, the taste and scream of iron). There would be the sound of gears when they went down, little ticks.

The search party piled in.

They were punchy without the promise of something to fight - digging wasn't close enough, not much glory in dying without being in a war, although they'd be able to mine that glory too sure enough. She held herself tall in the tall crowd, made sure her shoulders were squarer than Ace's. War Boys cackled and hissed, shouted to be the ones closest to the walls and closest to the door.

For a moment Furiosa thought the elevator would just hang there, leaving her staring at Immortan Joe and his sons spectating in the narrow hall. Then she spied the buttons between the press of shoulders and arms. Ranks of buttons, really, lettered tiny with nails or pins that had scraped away what had been written before and replaced it with cruder, fewer names. Down-deep, she saw.

"Press that one," she shouted, pointing. A war boy got in the way and she dug her elbow between the muscles of his upper arm. "Down deep."

Three or four hands scrabbled for the button. Behind her, Ace sneezed.

A grate and a door slid shut. She made sure the immortan was the last thing she saw before the shaking started, and the dark. Met his eyes like a salute. Body heat made the elevator feel humid almost instantly.

She hadn't expected the dark. The strip lights had blown out, and the darkness cued something instinctive, almost reptilian in all of them. Seconds from energy-panic and clout-panic at the best of times the war boys buzzed with the knowledge that there were 15 or so of them trapped in a box, 15 or so people used to burnt orange desert and red sky, and plenty of resources. (Not food, because war boy flesh was irradiated and even though Furiosa knew Immortan Joe encouraged some lies in order to separate his cabal from the People-Eaters', that one was probably true.)

Furiosa said, "Be quiet."

They did. They left nothing but breathing, and now she could hear the clank of the chain going around. It would be old gear in old chain, moving ever so slowly around through the dark. How long would they drop? How long had it been? Her ears popped.

Not a mutter, although the War Boys still shoved. They tried not to involve her in that, but the space was small, and it was a long drop.

They'd almost established a new split-second pecking order, with Furiosa at the whirlwind center of it and Ace half in and half out of the tense, posturing scrum behind her, when the descent stopped.

The door didn't open.

Furiosa twitched her shoulder and there were fifty thousand hands at the levers.

The door opened onto darkness. The way sounds were pulled away made her think the walls were soft rock, or something harder coated with rust - the racket floated in and disappeared.

They had brought three lights with them, two big electric torches and a flare.

One of the lamps clicked on now, making a tight, yellow cone of light. Furiosa stepped out into the hall. Behind her, the crowd refilled the corridor they had made to let her through, and swarmed past her into the hallway.

Ace, last, glided past the stencil on the wall, heavily fuzzed with dust, that read "freight."

The hall opened out into a low, artificial cavern, so dusty that it felt like she was breathing pebbles in. Evidence of human construction showed in dust-coated tile floor and crumbled metal grating. Part of the ceiling had come down, but at her left she could see a barely man-sized hole into a dark place promising a higher ceiling.

A slightly lighter haze of dust had fallen over the paths Immortan Joe's men had taken before, and Furiosa followed it. Once she was out of the direct beam of the light she sniffed more than squinted, catching the tang of plastic and metal. Sounds flattened out over here, did not bounce off the dust so much.

"Over here."

The crowd followed.

Someone had used this place as storage, had packed it with as much as they could. Shelves and cubbies stretched ahead of her until they ended at another rockfall, its dark edges picked out in pus-yellow in the lantern light.

Someone had stashed all this here, she thought. This is how Immortan Joe keeps us alive.

One of the war boys balked at the wall, started waving people over to a half-obscured obscenity scratched into the wall in letters so high people must have sat on one another's shoulders to hack in the uneven lines at the top. There were more boulders back here too, great shelves of the Citadel that had fallen off. They had trekked a while to get here, but had it been far enough that this still wasn't underneath the workings, wasn't about to have the whole world come down on it? Another dark hole beyond the rock fall she had seen when she initially walked in was the remains of a stairway, indistinguishable from any other pit except for the two intact steps at the very top.

"Somebody been here!" the first scout said, and others crowded around behind him. "Where from?" Threats and defensive insults, and Furiosa shoved her way in and stood looking up at the letters in the clearer light.

"What do we do?" said the first scout, turning around to her with a blank innocence in his bloodshot eyes, and Furiosa's lip curled.

"It's from one of ours," she growled, ripping him away from the wall by the straps of his goggles. The crowd sucked in a breath and let it out again, and the dust leeched the sound up like it would have done to water. "Get to work. Gather this stuff up."

They formed lines like a bucket brigade, hauling out crumpled plastic packets and things on the razor-edged remains of shelves and leaving them just outside the store. Some food came away in powder - it was too dry down there to mold, but the pieces just fell apart. No water, although she watched for booty-trapped cans or crumpled bottles Ace paced the line while Furiosa hauled, and then they switched.

Then the work was done. The last few caves were empty, with supplies piled on the floor. Meager stuff really; the packages had survived better than the contents, but she had had to break up a fight over ration bars that still looked edible.

She took the torch from a war boy who gave it willingly, opening his hand as soon as hers touched the plastic casing. "We're going down to the next level."

"Put a winch up. You." She grabbed Ace's shoulder with his flesh hand, spun him half way around while she pointed at the shelves behind her. "I want you up here holding a light."

His frown lines wrinkle, white powder and black soot. "Right, boss."

War boys wouldn't take ropes; they just started to leap down the rubble while Ace tied the rope he'd brought to the metal curtain half-unfurled in front of the stash. Got the other end around his waist and it was long enough to cinch with some give, so he started to wade down the rocky slope with the rest. Furiosa held the second torch on her shoulder like a rocket launcher.

When about half of them had gone down they started to holler that there was more down there - more caches, as she had expected. Ace's rope slithered along the rocks next to her, and she stepped around it gingerly, suddenly feeling like she was on dangerous footing between the loot pile and the rope. She could just barely see his back as he worked his way down the dim slope.

That was when things went bad.

She heard rock moving below her, and the rope scraping. More voices, and then a shake that she could feel in her teeth. The rock fall was new, she realized. She couldn't tell under the dust, but the stairwell had come down maybe as recently as the last search party.

There was a word on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn't remember it.

Instead of barking an order she just shouted, grit scratching in her throat. Ace took one more halting step, someone at the bottom made a huffing sound like they were getting into a fight, and the whole rickety system that the stairwell and the wall had revealed itself to be started to come down.

"Climb up!" She caught Ace's eye, heaved on the rope. "Climb up!"

The war boys heaved themselves upward, but for every hand that grabbed a boulder and pulled, another just pulled tens of smaller rocks down on top of the group and loosened more. Some of the wary war boys had already turned a corner in the dark. Furiosa locked her hand around the rope and dug into the rocks with her metal rig, digging backwards against the slope as if she could stop the entire wall from avalanching down.

How many down there? Twenty?

Even the shelf of rock above her was loosening, twisting toward the hole into which it must have nearly fallen when it first came down. The pile of supplies teetered on her right. One war boy made it almost all the way up, just for another to grab his belt loop from behind and pull both of them a few feet down.

Furiosa started shoving at the supplies, pushing boxes and packets of food back toward the overhang. No rope here? Of course not.

More rocks fell. Ace, down there somewhere, shouted. "Pull the rope, boss!"

More arms and heads came into view through a cloud of black dust. (They had probably lost their lamp, while hers lay now by her feet. She couldn't remember dropping it.) More rocks too, one more convulsion of earth that had suddenly found holes opening up underneath it. She piled and kicked at the supplies, getting them out of the way of the collapse, while hands stretched out behind her. Distant, strangled "Witness!" and "Immortan!" as the rocks clattered and the dust puffed, filling in the dark pit where the stairway had been.

Two of the war boys grabbed for her, their eyes wide and their hands going for her ankles and one long roll of paper that they had pulled from the cache. Turning, coughing in the dust, Furiosa shook them off so that she could move further up the hill and get more of the packs out of the way. She kicked someone in the hand, heard breath huff out of him as he lost his grip and landed on his stomach.

Someone had gotten ahold of the roll. She pulled it out of his grip with her flesh hand. She was braced much better than him, locking in even further as the rocks fell around her feet. Maybe she'd fall in with them, eventually, but for now she had to push another set of hands away from the supplies while the whole world seemed to turn vertical.

It was a nightmare, but she had to keep them from pulling the supplies down with them. Territoriality came as easy to her as to them, and she saw the bared teeth as someone fell down a new crevasse three meters away and she screamed to hear the echo cocoon her. The cave was not just dark but hazy now, fuzzy at the edges.

Another war boy hooked white fingers over the edge of what was now a sharp ledge where a boulder had fallen over the top of the stairs. Furiosa heard the sharp sounds as he lost his hold.

She got the supplies out of the way, out of the dust and rocks, and crouched with her hands over her head just under the lip of the cache.

How many had there been? How many?

One left. Silence and darkness. She saw Ace's bald head in the spotlight as he dragged himself up over the rocks from where he had rolled to the left and hung on. He was using the rope, and bleeding from a cut near his left ear. Shallow, some instinct in her thought, but in the darkness it looked like a spot on his skull had just been erased.

Reaching up to a paradise while she was still here with rope burns on her hands and the harness cutting into her shoulder adding acidic insult to sweating injury - the mechanic had been right.

Furiosa took him by both forearms and pulled back, hearing his boot heels scrape sideways over the rocks. He looked at her blank, admiring, with spit at the edges of his mouth and the blood sluggishly trailing down to meet it. Folded his legs and sat there for a second, then scrubbed his hand over his side of his face and started to lick the blood off and reclaim his water.

The sound of rocks falling became more distant in the darkness. One after another, rhythms she could almost catch.

Could have gone for the War Boys before the food, she thought, but the immortan wouldn't want it that way. That wasn't an even trade.

"Get the stuff up top," Furiosa said.

"Lost our party. Lost our flare." Ace sat there just breathing, occasionally forming silent words on cracked lips.

"We're all right. Get going," she said, quietly, staring at the rocks.

He nodded. His skull hadn't been bashed in; she could see the shape of the cut now.

They used Ace's rope to tie packs to his back and his shoulders. Furiosa surrounded herself with plastic and brittle, flaking boxes and trudged with the flashlight under her arm, pinching. Maybe the slope of his shoulders was some kind of gratitude. Maybe his gaze at the floor was acknowledgement that she had survived by being smart and quick and staying where she was put.

On the way back the elevator rattled and complained, and Ace and Furiosa did neither. The heavy boxes pulled at her metal harness even more, digging the leather into her skin. She focused on the shaking darkness over Ace's right shoulder.

Valhalla was a point on a map one thousand feet down.

Immortan Joe would send more to get the rest of the supplies. He would make whatever kinds of maps and tallies he kept to mark which caches had been explored, and his people would eat. She would not be rewarded. She would not be uplifted. Down here with only her own feet underneath her she seemed to be miles away from the complexity of the Citadel, even as somewhere the elevator gears locked their teeth together and pulled. Time was caught between the cogs. (Holy, holy.)

* * *

Their god did not seem concerned when they returned. Immortan Joe received them in the hall with Rictus behind him, and Furiosa had half-destroyed her shoulders in order to cross her hands over the boxes.

"Bring it all!" the Immortan crowed.

Rictus took armfuls of supplies from Ace, but not from Furiosa.

"There's more," she said as she kept pace with the immortan down the narrow hall. The bellows at the back of his neck filled and emptied.

"Then bring it." His gesture of dismissal nearly hit her on the side of the face.

"They didn't make it."

"Any enemies? Buzzards of the basement, my imperator?"

"No. Just … no one."

"Then we'll send others to retrieve the packages." He sounded impersonally satisfied.

She nodded. Looked back at Ace, who already had his fingers laced together. He nearly touched you, Ace's tired, admiring expression said.

Furiosa raised her head, wanted to rub at her shoulder. She was almost proud.

* * *

When she took the wives, it wasn't for the dead War Boys.

She had forgotten a lot more than she remembered, in the long days. She stole the wives because she needed to hurt Immortan Joe in the worst way, and she stole them because they had talked to her about going.

Redemption wasn't something that gave in quietly. Sometimes she had to sit on it, to push it down to make the idea of it stay in her brain and get her hands to work.

(She didn't have a word for retreat, and she didn't have one for guilt for a long time, either.)

Just before they got in the truck, just as she thought maybe the smells of metal and gas and milk would cover their cleanness up, someone stopped and looked at her.

"How do you know how to get there?" the Dag asked, staring, defiant. Clean, Furiosa thought again.

"I know that road. I've run it more than any of the imperators. You want to stay here? Or trust that I know which way is which in the desert?"

"We just need a foot on the pedals," the Dag said, and climbed in.


End file.
